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Monday, April 09, 2007

Interesting Crossover

Over at The Great Orange Satan, there's a blurb by a Canadian diarist about Jason Cherniak's Liblogs and their attempts to respond to Stephen Harper's attack ads with ads of their own.

Since I hadn't really seen much crossover between the established American blog scene and the still-new Canadian one, I thought it was worthy of note.

(So feel free to get to noting.)

One thing I learned from that entry that I hadn't known is that Harper outsources his attack ad production to an American firm, Mclaughlin and Associates. Quite a piece of work, judging by the client list, producing material for everyone from the RNC to the Smokeless Tobacco Council to the American Conservative Union to the lovely and talented people at the Media Research Centre.

Were I one of those Canadian bloggers making attack ads, I'd leave aside the general question of Harper using attack ads to focus on how and why Harper is retaining the services of such people. Attack ads attacking attack ads are kind of silly, as Calgrit ably points out, but Liberals can dine out for YEARS at the prospect of tying together Stephen Harper's and Big Tobacco's advertising connections.

In any case, this cements something that should be foremost in their minds right now- they aren't competing against "Tories", but against the Republican Machine. Disastrous governance aside, the Republicans' ability to use that machine should never, ever be underestimated.

Edit: This particular ad may not be professional, but it ain't bad.

The comments over at Youtube for it cement a problem that the Liberals are going to have to face, though- Liberal supporters are severely, severely underrepresented online compared to their Conservative counterparts.

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A political blogger using a pseudonym inspired by both the historical orator and Orson Scott Card's use of pseudonyms in the "Ender's Game" books. For more, see the first post.
No further connection to Card's work is expressed or implied.